…. Mississippi State, UD looks at a poem.

Many people know Wordsworth’s happy poem about daffodils; fewer know this remarkable piece by Ted Hughes, one of his poems to Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters.

Daffodils

Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,
Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot
(It was his last chance,
He would die in the same great freeze as you),
He persuaded us. Every Spring
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
‘A custom of the house’.

Besides, we still weren’t sure we wanted to own
Anything. Mainly we were hungry
To convert everything to profit.
Still nomads–still strangers
To our whole possession. The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we’d live for ever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera –
Our own days!

We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April – your last April,
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks –
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.

We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter’s bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens –
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered –
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch –

Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave’s stony cold
As if ice had a breath –

We sold them, to wither.
The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.

Every March since they have lifted again
Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.
On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering
They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,
Snipping their stems.

But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.
Here somewhere, blades wide open,
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod – an anchor, a cross of rust.

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That’s the poem. Let’s dig in, shall we?

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Daffodils

Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.

[All of the poems in the collection, written at the end of the poet’s life, directly address Plath. Note that the repetition in these opening lines seems appropriate, unlike the repetition in the recent inaugural poem, which seems merely to be trying to import some musicality to the verses.

Why does this repetition seem appropriate?

It captures the way the mind speaks to itself. The poet muses, thinks back, circles around events. It makes sense that he’d use the same word again and again. It comes across as very human — a little proud, a little irritable… Then too, to re-member is to put something that’s fallen apart together again, and there are two ways in which the poet can be said to be trying to do that: He’s trying to put the torn-apart daffodils together again, lamenting in the poem the way he and Plath tore them carelessly and prematurely out of the earth; and he’s also trying to put his broken life together again through the exercise of memory and the imposition of some order — if only an aesthetic one, through the writing of a poem — upon what just feels like pain and chaos.]

Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you.

[She’s forgotten both the event, that is, and her mother.]

And we sold them
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor?

[The poet for a moment turns away from Plath and asks himself this question, with a certain wistful incredulity.]

Old Stoneman, the grocer,

[Note the OH sound that recurs – old, stoneman, grocer. Gives the memory a certain folkloric, Mother Goosy feel.]

Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot

[Note the strong alliteration, and the use of the natural metaphor – beetroot – for a poem about nature. Flowers shoot up out of the ground; our blood pressure shoots up as another sort of natural manifestation.]

(It was his last chance,
He would die in the same great freeze as you),
He persuaded us. Every Spring
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
‘A custom of the house’.

Besides, we still weren’t sure we wanted to own
Anything.

[Evokes their confident bohemian youth.]

Mainly we were hungry
To convert everything to profit.
Still nomads–still strangers
To our whole possession.

[Here the key theme of the poem appears: We didn’t know what we had. We didn’t know how lucky we were to be alive, young, fertile. We flattered ourselves that we had a higher morality in regard to possession, but we were fools: We simply didn’t know how to value what we had because we thought – arrogantly – that we owned the world forever.]

The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.

[Again, we took the earth’s gifts for granted. We didn’t think about the lower depths, the difficulties, out of which they struggled, and the fragility of their existence once they emerged.]

As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.

[The sod. Plath’s grave, and all the darker truths it contains, but also hides, will appear in this poem.]

Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we’d live for ever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera –

[Note the use again and again of the letter L. Lends the words a lightness — what a couple of ladeedas we were…]

Our own days!

[Their hasting-away marriage. Not that they see the end coming.]

We thought they were a windfall.

[See how the greatest poets find the greatest words? Windfall. Both a piece of luck from nowhere, and also, literally, what he has already described: the act of falling from heaven. The poet drives us back to the origins of words, the ground of things, when he discovers linguistic windfalls… After all, the word windfall, for all its positive connotations, has in it the word fall, and this is a poem about the sudden fall of a life into death.

And – not that I’m keen on Dylan Thomas – but note that he got there first in a poem with the very same theme as this one: Fern Hill, which includes the line “Down the rivers of the windfall light.”]

Never guessed they were a last blessing.

[Guess. Bless. Sly rhymes.]

So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April – your last April,
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks –

[Soft, jostled, shocks, frocks — the language sings. But always in the service of its themes — the girlish prematurity of these lovers, and the whispering latency by which they begin to register their oncoming doom.]

Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.

We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter’s bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens –
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered –
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch –

[Here note simply the microscopic attentiveness to details of the physical world. You’ve never looked at a wilting daffodil as carefully as Ted Hughes has.]

Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave’s stony cold
As if ice had a breath –

[Into seriously Wuthering Heights territory here. The daffodils aren’t merely pretty flowers we’ll sell to the merchant for a little money; they’re messengers from deep in the earth, little flames distilled from dark underlying agonies.]

We sold them, to wither.

[Whither is fled the visionary dream? may also insinuate itself here.]

The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.

Every March since they have lifted again
Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.

[Wings as in things lifted like birds; but also stage wings, where unready dancers shiver anxiously.]

On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering

[Groundswell — a word as madly poetic as windfall. Great poems are true to the operations of consciousness — here, memories burst out of us, a groundswell of thought and feeling, and the poet captures this operation not by describing it as a psychologist might but by working it through obliquely, metaphorically, with the objects memory attaches itself to — those daffodils.]

They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,
Snipping their stems.

[An allusion here perhaps to their children — the daughter who happily harvests with no memory of her mother. Also an angry moment: Plath has cut short the childhood of her son and daughter by killing herself. They’ve been nipped in the bud.]

But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.
Here somewhere, blades wide open,
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod – an anchor, a cross of rust.

[Blades wide open. The rage and pain of his morbid reflections. The hectic undiminished terrifying eros of them even today for the poet. Wide open in the month of April, your scissors, spasm, meaty butts, those too-eager girls, soft shriek, wet…]

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A sort-of companion poem.
By Philip Larkin, a sort-of
friend of Ted Hughes.

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Cut Grass

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.